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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

ProRes stutters

So it's hard drive write speed? I can't imagine what else it would be. There's more than enough horsepower with an 8800GT and 8 cores with 16 gigs of RAM. There's something else going on here.
 
Yeah upon looking it appears that almost any footage stutters on camera pans (even reallly slow dollies). When the camera is still the footage plays smooth as silk. Any movement however and it stutters. We're now back to square 1. Maybe it's the HD I/O speeds?
 
This issue cover also RED/Mysterium/CMOS skew and frame rates redraw at LCD.

Somebody who works for a serious feature film should get a pro LCD monitor for editing and grading like a eCinema, Cinetal, Sony or any similar.
 
The Third Man said:
This issue cover also RED/Mysterium/CMOS skew and frame rates redraw at LCD.

Somebody who works for a serious feature film should get a pro LCD monitor for editing and grading like a eCinema, Cinetal, Sony or any similar.
Click to expand...

I haven't seen this issue on the 4K or 2K projections I have seen. So, I'm thinking it's probably not the sensor or skew. There is the usual 24 frames per second panning rules, but this stuttering effect does not seem consistent, so it makes me rule out the panning speed. I too thought my drives might be choking, so I got a faster RAID. Had a couple of questionable drives after running some tests, so have to wait for replacements and then I can test this issue again on some footage I know has shown this effect. I do know that I have seen a similar effect with my HV20. And I always convert to ProRes to get out of the HDV world, so maybe there is something to the ProRes theory. Maybe it's pushing enough data in the HQ mode to stress out the FW800 drives or small RAIDs. My new RAID is doing 380mb/s reads and 375mb/s writes, so should be plenty fast once I get the new drives in there.

And I also agree with Sanjin that the LCDs could be contributing to a certain extent as well.I would want to take a look at the footage on one of the really high end LCD monitors to see if it looks any different.
 
rainer said:
it seems to be a prores only problem. when we play the same clips as dpx on the baselight it runs ok. so prores is only a offline base for us. hopefully apple will get on this problem. it is a big pitty to show customers a offline edit and they are asking why sometimes the footage stutters. i am more and more loving avid.
Click to expand...

It happens on Avid also. I try to figure out when it happen to me with Avid DnXHD / Apple ProRes SQ and figure out that its to do with the Graphics card display. When we move through frame by frame either of two applications we cant find the strobing.

It's to do with Graphics card alon!
 
Ok so we've narrowed it down, we think, to a graphic card or HDrive throughput issue. This is really plaguing us. To make sure we have our settings right, can somebody take us through exactly how they set up their sequences and codecs in FCP? We have 4k footage that we want to take into FCP and output a 1080p file. What exactly do we need to do? We need to make sure we aren't entering a wrong setting or somewhere.

The more detailed the better, hell explain it to me as if I were a child!
 
Export your R3Ds to 1080P ProResHQ using Red Rushes, Redcine, Clipfinder, whatever program you choose to export from.

Import ProRes clip into FCP. Create a new sequence. Drag the ProRes clip to new sequence. When it asks if you want to match sequence to clip settings say yes. You should see no render bars. Make sure you are in Dynamic Playback mode (this will play the clip at a quality the computer can handle). Play clip. Does it stutter? If it does, maybe try selecting High quality playback to see what happens.

At this point your sequence is setup properly, so you can rule out a sequence setting problem.
 
stevesherrick said:
Export your R3Ds to 1080P ProResHQ using Red Rushes, Redcine, Clipfinder, whatever program you choose to export from.

Import ProRes clip into FCP. Create a new sequence. Drag the ProRes clip to new sequence. When it asks if you want to match sequence to clip settings say yes. You should see no render bars. Make sure you are in Dynamic Playback mode (this will play the clip at a quality the computer can handle). Play clip. Does it stutter? If it does, maybe try selecting High quality playback to see what happens.

At this point your sequence is setup properly, so you can rule out a sequence setting problem.
Click to expand...

Thanks Steve! Exported out of RedCine to 1080p and imported into FCP. Got a message saying the clip wasn't optimized for FCP, but imported anyway and selected "yes" to "do you want to adjust sequence settings to match clip." It still stutters a bit. I should mention that this is a very small stutter, but is still unacceptable if we're showing edits to a client. We can show a timeline to a client in Avid and it plays perfectly smooth. We cannot do the same with FCP.

I played the 1080p file in quicktime on a loop and had the activity monitor up to see what was going on. Disk read was about 20MB/sec average throughout the whole thing. We should easily be able to handle that with a 500gig internal 7200rpm drive right?
 
Jeff, can you list the specs of the final cut machine.

OS, Quicktime version, Redcine/Red Alert versions.

Are you playing the file from the same drive as the operating system or is it a separate internal drive? Download AJA system test and run it on your drives, make sure there are no issues.
 
QT 7.5.5
OSX 10.5.5
RED Cine 3.12

Everything is absolutely brand new (as of a couple of weeks ago):

Dual Quad Core 3.2 GHz Mac Pro with 16 gigs of RAM.
NVidia 8800GT card

Should be smoking fast. We have tried running stuff off the internal SATA 500gig drive, the external 2 TB LaCie drive (which has an eSATA connection but are still just 7200 rpm drives), everything. Nothing plays perfectly smooth except 1080p trailers from Apple.com.

Heck we even tried some 720p ProRes and 720p DVCPro files that we rendered from the RED footage and they both had the stuttering. Again it's very faint, but still unacceptable and there's no reason this should be an issue at all with our horsepower.
 
Also running AJA Test

For 1920X1080 8 AND 10 bit tests (1 gig file size) we got about 77MB/s average. Way more than enough for what we're doing. So the HardDisk doesn't seem to be the bottleneck.

Same results for 1920X1080 10-bit RGB

Same for all of those with an 8 gig file test.

Same for reading existing files off of internal, external, and REDMag drives.

So maybe it's the graphic card?

Looking at the AJA test there are several small spikes down when reading data from the drives. However they don't even drop below 70MB/s. Should still be plenty.
 
What are you running for video hardware? AJA, Black Magic? Do you have a broadcast monitor you can check it on?
 
We have no video hardware at the moment other than our nVidia 8800GT that is dual DVI out to our 24" monitor and 46" HDTV (still stutters on that too). We are in the market for a new KONA card for the Mac Pro of course, but just haven't purchased it yet. Surely this thing can play 1080p video though right? Without the Kona card? I mean I know that will make things better, but still.
 
Some nvidia cards have hardware qverks that make quicktimes not play smooth at highres. I have had better luck with ATI video cards.
 
Guys, we have a top of the line MacPros and we see this pretty regularly with ProRes. However, it completely goes away when we play it out of our Kona card, smooth as butter.
 
Hi guys, sorry if i insert myself, but since we'll shoot next week with a Red One and editing with FINAL CUT (and it's my first time with this beast-i mean the Red One)... i was thinking to capture all the footage with ProRes codec but now i'm scared...
The problem that you have is a problem just when you are editing or does it affect the final product? i mean, when you do the final export with the best compression do you still have the same problem (is it still stuttering?)
 
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